Gravity
by Tandrelmairon
Summary: "When you can't choose if, choose how." My take on the Rose/metacrisis 10th Doctor story we only got to see begin. Now rated M.
1. Chapter 1

_A/N: My take on the Rose/Tentoo story we only got to see begin._

 _For those who like to keep track, this is season 4, post-"Journey's End" in the parallel universe and post-"The Waters of Mars" in the main universe. To the best of my knowledge, it's canon-compliant, including the Journey's End deleted scene where the Doctor leaves Rose and the Metacrisis with a TARDIS coral._

 _For those who don't, it should stand alone if you don't mind a bit of mystery. Comments, particularly on the flow, are always much appreciated._

As usual, when the Metacrisis Doctor woke in the dark, Rose was asleep.

She was still asleep when he dressed silently, navigating the room by the yellow light of the streetlamp through their window. Then, as usual, just as he reached the door and was sure he'd mastered the quiet slipaway, she rolled over and opened her eyes.

"Bananas in the break room fridge."

He grinned. One day he'd make a clean exit, but not today. "A fellow trying to sneak out could get a complex. Sorry."

"Mmf." She raised her head from the sleepy golden muddle of her hair to meet his eyes over the pillow, and smiled. "You all right, though?"

He came back and leaned over the bed to kiss her, at a rotational angle of 84 degrees. She was awake enough to cup his neck and pull him in, her other hand patting his shirt pocket to check that he'd gotten his specs. "All right. Just up. Look me up when you're in? If all goes well I may still be around."

She murmured something that might have been agreement, and was back asleep a moment later. A soldier's talent, that, coming instantly awake and then back down again. He had memories of mastering it long ago himself, but this body had had to learn it from scratch over the three years of its existence. Rose had honed it to mastery at Torchwood.

His 3 A.M. trips to the institute were the compromise they'd found between their human and his Gallifreyan physiology – their non-negotiable need for nightly sleep, and his peak capacity around five hours. The feel of the campus buildings at that hour was at once otherwordly and homelike - silent, dim, and weighty with the ceaseless feed of data from the sensor grid, always seeming just about to speak. With just the hurtling earth under his feet, the silent stars spinning in their ranks, and all the electronic ears of Torchwood like a kludged-together ham radio to the universe, those hours were the next best thing to helming a TARDIS.

With any luck, Rose would come in about daybreak, to ensure he and the building were both standing – "or lend a hand concealing the evidence" - and they'd have something worthwhile to talk through over tea. With any luck, this particular morning, it would be a breakthrough in graviton perturbation cartography of the neighboring dimensions, and he'd have a lovely comparative map of where the same neighboring stars lay in each of them.

Crossing pools of lamplight past the curtained terrace houses lining the two blocks to Torchwood, with stars overhead and bananas in the break room, he was filled as he often was those mornings with a kind of quiet triumph. They had started with mismatched ingredients and the vaguest of blueprints, he and she and this second-choice world. But with that weedy human resilience his other self admired, life had poked its tendrils up through the mess and started climbing. And, weedlike, it was nothing like he'd planned.

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His first night under these stars, three years before, it had reared its head in his room upstairs from hers, at a beachside bed-and-breakfast whose reluctant manager had broken under Jackie's stare and found three vacancies after all. He'd been lying on his back in the dark, taking stock.

He had twelve hours alive and nine hundred years of memories. Some were glorious, some hilarious, and a few flared up on probing with a dazzle of pain that filled him with pity for his other self. Rose laughing at him; Rose shining with the light of spacetime, destroying and giving life; Rose clinging to the lever at Canary Wharf, fingers slipping into the Void; a blank wall with nothing on the other side.

He had a body count in the millions, a life sentence, and a ridiculous, impossible gift. He had been downstairs three times that night to check that she still existed.

That afternoon on the beach as they stared at each other, the TARDIS gone and the surf beating somehow unperturbed on the sand, she'd broken it first. "So, I'm sorry," she said wryly, "for denying you your identity, just now, in front of everyone you know in this world." She gestured down the surf toward Jackie with her free hand.

"Not at all; these things happen," he'd replied cheerfully, eyes on her, his heart still unclenching. Five minutes before, he'd stepped off the TARDIS expecting, since the moment he'd offed the Daleks, to spend his life alone in exile in this universe, with only Jackie to ring up to reminisce about the glory hours once in a while. Even that was pure kindness, his other self's sentimentality – another Gallifreyan would have destroyed him as soon as he was no longer needed, regardless of anything he'd done. Partly for being a mixed-species abomination, but mostly for the danger he posed to spacetime by knowing the true name of a Time Lord.

Yet here he was, and Rose was staying. One ' _but he's not you'_ was a small price to pay. The thready spurt of joy he felt wasn't fair, but he couldn't quench it.

"And sorry," she'd added, not dropping his hand, "for the snogging ambush just after. You can press charges in this world too, if you like."

They'd both laughed there on the beach, hands clasped, in some dizzy mix of exhaustion, grief and hope. But she looked raw and wrung-out, and he'd wondered if his other self had just done something to her, with the best of intentions, that neither of their selves understood.

He would have asked her about it there, if not for the faint sense that some modicum of privacy should enter their relationship. That, and a nagging conviction that he needed to convince Jackie immediately that the TARDIS coral didn't stand a chance in this world, before she mentioned it to the Torchwood director she was married to.

Lying on the beaten-down mattress of the usually-unrentable attic room later that first night, he'd been under no illusions that anything was settled. Or, for that matter, that any of his memories of Rose had happened to this body. But at that time, he still thought like a Gallifreyan, reasoned like a Gallifreyan. The memories were real and they were his; ergo, really his. The proper ingredients were present: she and the TARDIS coral were here, and he had memory to be his scripture and signposts for a while. The rest could be sorted with time.

The attic hatch cracked open. Rose in a too-big borrowed t-shirt and sweatpants peered up, and the wash of warmth that lifted in him on seeing her felt entirely his own.

She lifted the hatch till the shaft of light fell across his face and she saw his eyes were open. She gave him a half-wry, half-embarrassed smile, brown eyes crinkling sweetly, as if to say, _caught me._ "Sorry." She started to back down.

He flipped on the bedside lamp, lighting the peaked pine rafters and the floor beams. "You, too? I've been down peering in your doorway every couple of hours." _For weeks after Canary Wharf, I, he, would wake on the TARDIS, and whole seconds would pass before I remembered you were gone. Every time, for me, it all happened again._

She came up a few steps and flashed another smile; she was generous with them, he remembered. "We must be just missing each other."

He budged up to a sitting position, making the mattress creak ominously, and got a better look at her. There had always been something lush and generous about her face that made people see what they wanted to; usually, someone harmless, good for asking the simple questions that kept things clear in the midst of otherworldly chaos. That had bothered her sometimes, he knew; he wondered what she thought of her newer, angular look. It was more likely now that people would see a soldier.

Regardless, from the new steadiness about her, he had a dim sense that she had said " _the Doctor will save us"_ for the last time long ago.

"Well, then," he said cheerfully, "want to consolidate? Save us both some walking." It was strange, saying that; even innocently as he meant it, as his other self he could never have made that offer to a mayfly living on his ship under his protection. He tossed the covers back and padded over to drag the little wicker couch closer. "Take the bed, if you like? I'm still not entirely sure if I need it."

In retrospect, he wasn't sure how many parts each of hope, loneliness, and kindness it was that she had stayed; he'd have to ask her. "All right, then." She slipped past him and under the quilt, searching his eyes in the lamplight. She looked just then like she had after his – well, _essentially_ his - past regeneration, looking for something familiar in a new face.

It was his turn to break the silence. And it was always his turn to be cheerful in strange times. And he was desperately curious about the years they had missed. So he had asked her to tell him everything.

She told him about the long process of scoping out the character of this world's Torchwood, the secondhand joy of coming to know her not-father father, and how in the years since Canary Wharf she'd seen how the heart healed with time on its own accord, even against her will. She told him about their first giddy excitement over dimension cannon theory, and then the increasingly desperate work to make it reality as the stars began to wink out.

Then she decided it was his turn to tell all, and he prattled happily about the living sun and the Master and reuniting with the Ood, while she listened with the same old mix of one part fascination and one part limitless patience. And then they went further back, to the years where their memories were shared – the Sycorax, Cassandra, Krok Tor. It was bittersweet and marvelous; they laughed as if none of the darker things that had followed were even possible. He was auditioning for the role of himself. He didn't care.

A few of the stories did feel different even then somehow, as they talked through them; minor transient details that felt now like great gaping plot holes. He chalked it up to the bits of him that were Donna, finding their place in his mind. It didn't seem worth mentioning. They fell asleep with the light on.

He woke an hour later with his brain on fire.

The memories were going wrong. No, the memories were right, but his mind was wrong for them. It was in fact the Donna bits, but they were not going to settle quietly into a Gallifreyan mental order. They were going to burn the house down. They tossed up one memory after another at him, splayed it out, and then rotated it to a mad angle, like a kaleidoscope, the pieces all the same but the themes completely changed.

In the physical world, he sat bolt upright and gasped. Rose woke swiftly, blinked at him, and scrambled up to sitting, kicking the covers off. "Doctor? You all right?"

He turned to look at her, head pounding, and tried to say something reassuring. What came out instead was: "Jackie Tyler, alone in her council flat, watching the wall clock. The only person she loves in her world is out seeking adventure with a strange man who craves distraction more than life. She knows the world and how that story ends, despite everyone's best intentions, and there is nothing she can do. Because Rose sees her mother through his eyes now. And he finds her ridiculous."

Rose was accustomed to non sequiturs from him. She looked at him with mingled worry and regret, and seemed to consider her words. Finally she went with, "Yes. I know. But that was my fault as much as yours. His. Yours." She took a breath and tried again. "More my fault." She leaned over to study him. "You've got that Destroyer-of-Worlds look on. Are you all right?"

He took a deep breath and tried again. His single heart was beating wildly, off to one side; it was throwing off his balance. He forced himself to pull it together. "Me? I'm fine. Just a bit of mneumoneural reconciliation. The Donna bits are synapsing with memories of things they know they wouldn't have done. Perfectly natural. Right as rain in a few hours." He tried to smile reassuringly, wasn't sure he'd succeeded from the look on her face, and then lost it again when another one reared up.

"Sarah Jane Smith, alone on a world she's no longer fit for. Not sure why the center of her world never returned for her; just like a human, wondering what happened, she can't shake the fear that she fell short. The truth is somewhere in the mix in her head – he can't let anyone who knew him as a whole man see the wreck the Time War made of him – but she'll never know for sure, because it doesn't occur to him she's stuck like this, doesn't occur to send word. Move on. Move on."

Rose slipped over to the couch and sat beside him. "Can you put a stop to this? It's hardly fair; you didn't…" She trailed off, for which he was profoundly grateful, not saying, _you didn't do any of it; you didn't exist._ Losing claim to those memories was too high a price to pay for absolution from them. "You meant it for the best."

"Always do," he said as cheerfully as he could manage from under the rising tide of self-horror, and patted her hand. Another memory gripped him; he raised his eyes and met hers.

"Mickey Smith," he said. Her face fell; she dropped her eyes and he tried desperately to shut up, change the subject, but his executive function was a helpless bystander, waving from the windows as the tidal wave swept by.

"Focusing on carburetors and alternators to keep his eyes off the sky. His lover's off with another bloke, and it's not even quite that sort of love; apparently he's such a waste of a person that he lost her to an _idea._ But that's life; he could move on, but the bastard's filled her head so full of noble sanctimony, she doesn't even realize she's dumped him for it, so he can't be sure." He fought his way back to the helm for a moment. "Rose, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Don't listen; maybe it's best you leave. Come back in an hour. I'll be myself again."

"I don't think you will," she said slowly, and he knew she was right. She stroked his head like he was a small child; he closed his eyes and tumbled in the storm.

They came, one after another, flashes of the uncounted strangers and acquaintances tossed in his wake. In none of them was his other self deliberately hurtful; he simply, unforgivably, hadn't noticed. He was dimly thankful as he babbled that most of the others were only names to her.

Then it peaked, with the moments of that earlier afternoon, which flew apart and reassembled into a nightmare. His head jerked up; it hurt, worse than regeneration. He scrambled back from her, landed against the arm of the couch and stared at her, panting.

"Rose Tyler. Dropped on an alien shore with a dangerous stranger, and directed to transfer her love over to him like so much store credit. He may not be the man she moved time and space for, but that's all right, they both assure her. She should be glad for such a deal. _Because he's really very like._ "

In the silence that followed, in the sudden bright well of tears in her eyes and her embarrassed effort to blink them back before he noticed, he knew it had hit home. He hated himself and his other self equally. With the glazes of memory and Time Lord self-assurance stripped away, he realized he was really seeing her for the first time, as she got her eyes clear and soldiered on. " _Rose._ I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I should have said something. I didn't understand."

His disconnected executive functions were trying to make plans. He would leave. No. That was, apparently, what he always did. The only thing still clear was that he hadn't a clue what was good for anyone.

He was dimly, profoundly grateful his other self couldn't see this moment. It would have broken his hearts.

"No," she said gently, her voice closer. "He didn't either. I know that now." He could hear a strange relief in her tone; it meant something, having the way that moment had felt to her spoken aloud. She put one hand on the wicker back of the couch, a few inches from his. "But I would have fought him harder if I'd thought he was really wrong."

He looked back up at her in surprise. The understanding he'd resolved never to push on her was already there, likely grown over long years in this second world. For a dragon to love a mayfly cost the dragon almost nothing. But it would be, over time, desperately unfair to the mayfly. As a mayfly himself, or perhaps a square off the cube of a Gallifreyan consciousness, he knew his other self had done right to withdraw now, and would have been right even if he himself had never existed.

"Not a stranger, though," she said after a moment. "A new member of the family. With the family features."

He looked up at her. That was something. "You have to know…"

She raised her eyebrows, and there was a heartening cheekiness in her eyes. "…that he meant it for the best?"

"We always…he always does." The mneumal firing was slowing now, potentials equalizing across the new synapses. He pulled himself together, panting. "He couldn't have known what it was like for you. The Gallifreyan sense of the individual is a bit different. Regeneration, after all, you see."

"I do a bit, yeah." Her smile had changed in their years apart; there were more layers to it now, but he thought there was something genuine there. "This is already twice the personal talk you can usually bear at a time. Unless that's changed in the past hour, too?"

He laughed once, helplessly - "Ask me again in a few days?" – And she joined in. He took a breath; he had no idea how to live with the self he had inherited. Slowly he said, "I suppose it takes different virtues to live a life in place."

Rose gave him that reflective look again; there were any number of true things she could have said, and he waited for her verdict. Finally she said, "Courage still turns out to be a big one." And then she gave him a real smile. "So you're going to be brilliant."

He ducked his head, strangely embarrassed. "Well. I'll speak to Jackie in the morning." _So many others I can never speak to, and him in their universe never knowing he should._

"She'll like that."

They were silent for a moment. Of all things, there was apparently a clock in the room, just now making itself heard, measuring out the moments of this single timeline.

Rose was searching his face again. "The part about you being dangerous. Blood and anger and revenge. Needing fixing." There was something competent and gentle in her eyes. "Was it a bit…cutting?"

He blinked away the fading memories and tried to focus on the concrete question, something solid to hold onto in the shifting sand of what sort of person he was. "Meant to be, I think. A heavy responsibility for you and a good dose of self-doubt for me. Tie us both down for a bit, keep either one of us from spinning off 'in the widening gyre', as it were, till our thoughts settle out. Gallifreyans, we're, they're, not rubbish at _all_ aspects of human psychology.

"On the other hand. I committed genocide. I don't regret it. And that is frightening." He shook himself. _He's too dangerous to be left on his own_. He was not quite ready to decide what his other self's parting words meant to him, or the way he had fled that world whole minutes before he had to, so clearly appalled by what he'd made. Like a full-thickness burn, it didn't yet hurt. "Still, better me in this world than no Doctor at all, hopefully."

"The thing is," she said ruefully after a moment, "I'd have done the same." He blinked. "I did do, of course. A few years back. It was easier for him to forgive me than-" she gestured to him – "himself."

The metacrisis Doctor laughed, a bit grimly. "A bloodthirsty pair, we are." He took a breath; his one heart was slowing, heavy and perilously free at the same time. Nothing for it but to say it. "But I'm fairly certain I'm not bad enough to need the Bad Wolf to contain me." He looked down. "You've been chained to a blue box, one way or another, for long enough. Take your time. Figure out what you want."

She smiled. There was one part each in it of the Bad Wolf and of wisdom. Through the little garret window, the eastern horizon had grown faintly visible, and she turned to watch it come into focus. "I want." She glanced back at him. "I want…"

He caught on after a moment, guffawed, and got to his feet, only slightly dizzy. "Come on." He'd held out his hand, as memory told him he'd once held out a rougher hand on Earth, in a sea of people, the first time he'd asked her what she wanted. "Something must be open. Let's go find you some chips."

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In the present, where he waved to the Torchwood duty station guard as he rounded the corner down the half-lit industrial hall to Applied Astrophysics, the Donna and Doctor bits of him seemed mostly to have made peace. They were together in his head, if nowhere else, and that was something.

He let himself in to the lab he'd taken over bench by bench, filling it with sensors lifted to the menagerie of signals like bird calls in the forest of the cosmos. It was a bit of a forest itself by now, cables crossing overhead between towered receivers on benches. The defensive benefits were clear enough to keep Torchwood motivated to keep the lights on. But the side effects were more to his purpose: humanity building up experience with the different voices of its nearest neighbors, learning what to take seriously and whom to trust.

He moved into the center, to the queen of the room, the graviton probe. She was a chimera of three centuries of cartography tools, controls and display screens, laid out in a rough chaotic circle round the central processor where a man could move round and reach them all. She was thrumming along in a test pattern, just re-mapping the stars in her own dimension.

The real challenge was still finding a way to validate their locations in the neighboring dimensions, without another vantage point outside Earth to compare results from. Possibly by mounting the probe on a space-going unmanned vessel. If he could miniaturize and harden the whole apparatus, if Torchwood was feeling flush, and if everyone was prepared to wait a year or two for results.

There in the silent half-lit fluorescence, as usual, he closed out the test pattern, turned the sensors outward, and swept the graviton probe like a flashlight down the hall of the multiverse to peer into its other rooms. The familiar triple ping of the search pattern started, one for each of the three dimensions of location for an object within its universe. The planetary bodies of the neighboring dimensions' Sol system equivalents swam into focus onscreen, each with its infinite duplicates down the dimensions, like reflections in facing mirrors out into eternity.

Of course, if it was going to take much more than a year or two to validate star mapping, it might be possible to just take the probe out for its second vantage in the daughter-TARDIS. But there were some things no Torchwood in any universe should develop a taste for access to in this millennium, and that was most of them.

Waiting, he sat back and looked round at the physical evidence of the give-and-take of his compromise with Torchwood. No weapons permitted in Applied Astrophysics, but the doors, walls, floors and ceilings were sheathed with Dalekanium, with shutters of the same for the windows, entrance controlled from the guard station, and isolable ventilation and power. If the world began to end, this room could hold out almost anything long enough to make a plan.

Not a bad show. Despite a bit of rough going at the start.

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At his first meeting with Pete, in his first weeks on this world – achieved by poking round Torchwood like he owned it, periodically scribbling on a bit of paper, till the poor fellow called him into his office to prevent his being mown down by some panicky guard's rifle – he'd still been sick from the mneumoneural reconciliation. And sicker from having realized belatedly what, if it had been this bad for him, must have happened to Donna.

He was in no mood for mutual congratulations over saving the multiverse. It was time to take a swing at being this world's Doctor.

"I want to offer you a deal," he'd said, as brightly as he could, forcibly reminding himself Pete Tyler was a good man and a potential not-quite-father-in-law. "You've got all the heavy metals you need on this planet. You can build some lovely defensive tech."

Pete, hands clasped over the chaos of paper on his desk, ready a moment before with some cheerful small talk, had gone still, all business.

"Fields within which no nuclear reaction can take place. Some really brilliantly long-range sensors. Alien biometric detectors. Those, I can also test for you. Bzzt!" He grinned, but mirthlessly, and judging from the look in his eyes as he leaned back in his desk chair, Pete realized it.

"But?"

The Doctor dropped himself into the chair across the desk and leaned forward. "You've also got some very nasty stuff here." He pulled the crumpled paper from his pocket and pushed it across the desk. "This list is all the things that need destroying, very carefully. Let me supervise that, and I'll walk your people through the alternate tech, nut by bolt."

Pete took the paper wordlessly and scanned it. His lips tightened and relaxed as he moved from line to line. After a long moment he looked back up at him.

"I'm not certain," he said slowly, "which of us has more leverage here. And I hate to be this sort of ass. But experience with the other you tells me you'll give us the defensive tech when we need it, regardless. Even if I pointed every weapon on this list at the sky and left it running."

"Well, yes," he'd admitted freely, hands up. "You've got me there. No fooling Pete Tyler. No leverage at all. But there's still something you're missing."

Pete raised his eyebrows. The Doctor sat back and folded his hands behind his head. "Keep going with those lines of research, and you'll have your own Canary Wharf soon. Then perhaps every two to three years after. As I've no travel plans at the moment, naturally I'll do everything I can to help. But here's what you're not considering."

He pulled out the sonic screwdriver he'd purloined shortly after offing the Daleks, in anticipation of his permanent stopover. His other self must certainly have noticed, but had courteously said nothing. No matter; cut off from the TARDIS, it had stopped doing anything but glowing a week later. "You know one Doctor and what he'll do if you accidentally tear the universe open. Appear out of nowhere with a mad plan, and save the world with the TARDIS and the wonderful things inside. But the Doctor in this world?" He pointed the screwdriver downwards between them. A little dancing blue dot appeared on the desk. "He has a penlight."

He popped the screwdriver back in his pocket, jumped up, shook Pete's hand vigorously and turned to go. "Think it over. I'll be around." He hesitated. "Possibly at the dinner table. I'll try not to make it awkward."

Pete sighed behind him. On that, they were in perfect accord.

At the doorway, something else occurred to him, and he turned back. "Also, I'd like a credit card. With money on."

Nonplussed, well on his own way to getting accustomed to him, Pete only said, "How much?"

He hadn't thought that far. "Oh, well, whatever's enough for bananas. And a pair of brainy specs. And some of those chips she likes."

His one heart was pounding when he closed the door behind him. But then, his other self had usually seemed cooler in planet-changing negotiations than he felt, too.

They'd shaken hands on it later that week; he'd begun his gradual takeover of the Applied Physics lab in the months that followed, and had the idea for the graviton probe a couple of years after. ("Pete, your own theorists have already stumbled into this. Go and ask them. Have you never wondered why gravity is so much weaker than the other fundamental forces? Gravitons go absolutely everywhere, diffusing their power over any number of dimensions. And we're going to watch them do it.")

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The probe squawked.

Four months of searching out the neighboring planets and nearby stars in other dimensions, turning up readings consistent with everything from black holes to asteroid belts, and this was the first time linear motion detection had gone off.

A good thing, too, until now. A mass effect big enough to detect, making a linear transit, was unusual in a star system, where objects generally preferred to move in circles. Either a chunk of planet escaping orbit and most definitely large enough to be missed, or a fleet of ships going somewhere intentional, of a collective size that was only sensible for one purpose.

He switched over to the quadruple ping of linear tracking: the three for the object's location, and the fourth along its predicted path, to confirm it showed up as expected.

The object was moving past a planetary body – the Mars analogue, by mass. As the fuzzy monochrome light of the display focused in on it, the hairs on his neck prickled. Higher mass density in the core, lower toward the edges, but the gradient was too linear to be a natural body. It was a war formation - keep the big ships in the center. Death on engines, three to eight universes over based on the recoil time.

He felt like a man leaning over a bridge rail to look into a fish pond, and seeing a school of barracuda swim purposefully by below.

Then, slowly, the mass signature spread out and began to dissolve, from the edges inward. Over 8.2 seconds, by his approximate halfbreed time sense, it melted away into nothing.

Better no war fleet than one war fleet, he supposed, but the process was less than reassuring. Feeling vaguely paranoid and ridiculous, he jumped up from the probe and darted round the room, checking the motley assortment of more humble this-universe-only sensors to convince himself the fleet hadn't reappeared in his own world. No, only spread out from each other, and each individual ship was too small for the probe to detect.

That was why he almost missed it.

A lance of graviton perturbation on the probe display sliced out of nowhere, anchored itself in the Mars-analogue planet in a motion absurdly like a grappling hook, swung from the planetary contact point, and vanished. He felt a sudden, nameless unease.

Immediately the fleet coalesced again, tightening to a small dense knot, back in a linear beeline to the lance's point of origin. As he watched, it overshot, doubled back restlessly, and gradually dissolved again.

"Hello," he murmured to no one. "Trouble finding your target? Slippery little fellow."

Minutes passed. The fleet dissolved again – spreading out to search, he assumed. The graviton perturbation lanced out again from a different point; the fleet reconverged on it. At a guess, whatever was sourcing the lance was using the planet as an anchor to reposition itself to evade the searchers, like swinging from vines.

A drama, or romp, or exercise playing out in the Sol-analogue system, queasily close to that dimension's Earth-analogue but not focused on it. And none of it done with present-day human technology, unless something extraordinary was happening on that Earth.

Watching the flash of the lance and the answering fleet coalescence, repeating every few minutes as the quarry dodged about, he finally realized why he felt so uneasy.

Any number of species might pass through the effective range of the graviton probe, roughly the solar system's diameter. Only one was likely to hang about a nearby dimension's Earth, travel as a single ship, and use gravity as its rappelling harness as if its people had invented black holes.

One easy way to find out.

The metacrisis Doctor gave himself one breath, surprised and a bit ashamed of the ridiculous, roofless dread that had settled on his shoulders. Then, without changing the line of sight, he set to modulating the beam power. Only one species, too, would be able to receive and interpret a graviton beam bearing a nineteenth-century Earth Morse Code transliteration of modern Gallifreyan.

He delayed another 1.7 seconds, debating what to send.

 _Wrapping up world domination here; next stop, yours._ Too bitter, and without the option of tone, rather cruel.

 _Do you require assistance?_ Dimensions apart, the jumpers defunct, no way to do more in that universe than rap on the glass, that would be even crueler.

And the one he actually sent, across the worlds to the not-himself other self who had fashioned him in his image like a footprint from a boot: _Is that you?_


	2. Chapter 2

"It's a bit like – _ow_ \- beads on a string," he had told Rose, as they sat cross-legged on a concrete warehouse floor plucking filospores out of each other, one late afternoon their first year together in this world. He was fairly sure she had timed the question about Time Lord identity to distract them both from the hairlike little darts, rude gifts from a fleeing fungoid roving consciousness, before they could germinate.

He also suspected the timing went the other way as well; the filospores were a fair distraction from the topic. They had weathered the past months together like two convalescents sharing a ward room, wounded in different battles of the same war, sharing their days but knowing some stories had to come out in their own time. Apparently, it was time for this one.

"All discrete, but simultaneously, all part of the single...rosary, chain, whatever you like. And all formed by the chain, for the chain. They are what they are because a certain type of bead is needed just there. Then suppose a lone, free-living bead comes along and asks questions like, 'How can it be one object if I sometimes run into one bead, and sometimes another?' Or, 'But which is the _true_ bead?' Perfectly fair questions, but impossible to answer without the experience of a collective identity."

The filospores had been a late addition to his day, and unlike her, he was poorly dressed for dealing with them. Thus it was purely reasonable that she had undone his top button, with a glance that was half-apologetic and half-amused, and begun searching deftly just under the collar line.

Trying to focus on spore extraction, he was fascinated by how severely his still-newish mind-body package was misinterpreting this development. His other self had always, in his current regeneration, been moved and calmed by friends' touch to a nearly embarrassing degree. But that had been affection, not attraction; the live-wire edge now crackling along under this body's skin where her fingers brushed it was new.

They had been building a new normality, in between turning back Slitheen-analogue invasions. This one was video game marathons and 2 AM plotting at the institute and fierce darts matches at the pub and quarreling over the bathroom, the small endless varieties of one world instead of many. It was brilliant, nearly everything he'd been born craving, and he was generally happy to keep building it this way. Only, these situations _would_ keep happening, raising ideas his biological knowledge explained but didn't remotely prepare for, and making it difficult to concentrate. Naturally, he kept talking.

"The thing is, I'm off the chain myself now, rolling round solo, with the spirits of past beads in me but no connection to future ones. I know what I know, but I'm not sure I – ow - know it in quite the same way anymore. Sorry about this, now."

Her first answer was a tight-throated hiss as he worked out a particularly hooked one from her neck. Then, panting a bit, she said, "Arms up," and leaned forward on her knees to check inside his t-shirt sleeves as he raised them obediently.

Her mobile buzzed. She pulled it out one-handed; her other hand slid over his triceps, lightly, feeling for stragglers. "Mum, can I – oh. All right. Here you go." She handed it over, looking faintly amused. "It's for you. Yours must be dead again." Six months in this world, and he still couldn't fully accept that ordinary mobiles wouldn't charge themselves.

"Jackie?" He pinched the phone between ear and shoulder. "Everything all right?" Her litany took him a few moments to parse, but once he did, he winced for her. "No, you're right; there is no plug. The power source is the guests themselves. I'd serve them something with lysine in it…I don't know, any sort of meat. Sacrifice the pot roast leftovers. That should hold you till I can have a look. And you'll tell Pete one of your cocktail guests is plotting something vile, won't you? No, for Vitex, I should think; if it were for Torchwood, the whole block would be seeing them. Got to run; I'll be round tonight."

He slipped the phone back into Rose's pocket. "Pete's intentionality visualizer has sixty socialites hallucinating acts of espionage over cocktails."

She winced. "Poor mum. Another one for your project kill list."

"First chance. Have to think of something lovely to trade him, though. It's close to his heart."

Rose shook her head. "You're a soft touch, you know." It was the sort of thing she'd never said to his other self, but teased him often with now. "I still say he's playing you like a fiddle. I love him, but it's true."

And it was, though two could play that game – he had made a rule of handing over tech only up to five to ten years ahead, but packaged with stunning visual effects. "You ought to think about turning off the tap for Applied Physics for a bit. Come over into AIR. Then she corrected herself – "More so, that is," - as he rarely missed shoehorning himself into a dodgy Alien Immigration and Relocation mission.

The timing of that proposal seemed to strike her a moment later. She paused from de-sporing him to gesture round at the piping above them, the dank hulks of abandoned machinery around, and then the two of them, covered with barbs. Her eyes were laughing. "All this could be yours."

He laughed out loud. "Show me the world, Rose Tyler. How did you get approval for alien refugee resettlement, anyway? I don't get the sense Parliament is much more welcoming here than _there_." _There,_ because _home_ wasn't quite right for their old dimension, and no other English word was either.

Rose shook her head. "I did try that tack first - England as a shining beacon of hope and comfort. No luck. Then I tried alien immigration as Earth's chance for getting tech and intel to prepare to face the cosmos – case in point, your other self. Better luck, but not enough, and by that point the stars had started going out. Not much enthusiasm for the rest of the cosmos in government after that."

"So?"

"So. Finally I thought to point out what we'd been missing back _there_ , all the way back when the nesting consciousness came, and the Slitheen, and the Sycorax, and the Sontarans. The next best thing to a police box when the criminals of the cosmos are at the door." Her dark eyes twinkled. "Witnesses."

He laughed in sheer delight, leaning round to check behind her ears. "Rose. That's brilliant."

She grinned up at him. "Did the trick."

But a moment later she dropped her eyes, and made a deliberate return to topic. "But. One bead comes off the chain. Made by the chain to be a certain way, but now it's rolling round loose, free-living." She took a breath. "What I'm trying to ask you is, would that bother it? Never been asked what it wanted to be, never got to shape itself over time like the rest of us, just sort of…made."

He let go of her ear, and sat back a bit to meet her eyes. "Where's this coming from, then?"

"Just that you stepped into the role like it was assigned you. If you wanted to, suppose…solve crimes, or paint sunflowers...would you have said? Proper hard, with everyone looking to you, yeah?"

He blinked. She'd begun stripping out such speech patterns years ago, before Canary Wharf, around the time she'd heard her own voice call her a 'chav'. One of Cassandra's small casual cruelties. Since their reunion, she'd hardly used them at all, while Jackie held on to them with a kind of defiant pride. Human class politics. No telling what they thought of the Chiswick bits Donna had left in his own speech.

Something at play here must be making her anxious. He almost asked then, but he had resolved to stop answering questions with questions.

But he wasn't sure. Not sure he could have wanted something different, and not sure he would have said if he did. It wouldn't have mattered; there was a job to do, and his brilliance was not the dreaming sort. He was only sure of a few things. That he wanted, like his other self, to see his Earth safe and strong now, and free and kindly by the time it reached the stars. And that his other self would not be pursuing that by half-cooperating with Torchwood, paying Rose's offworld AIR contacts to retrieve him scrap Dalekanium from his own genocide, or scouring London borough by borough for this world's Donna in the vague hope there might be something they could do for her.

He wasn't sure how to say all that, but he was fairly certain she would understand. "Would you have said," he asked her finally, "if you hadn't wanted to ride the Dimension Cannon? The only person in this universe who understood who she was looking for? But at the same time, you weren't shy about picking out that monster of a gun to take along."

Rose looked at him wryly. "Living in place. When you can't choose if, you choose how."

"Yes," he agreed, relieved. "Precisely."

But that didn't seem to settle things. Rose gathered herself. To his surprise, she took his hands in hers, with a sort of deliberate steadiness. His heart began to pound without knowing why.

"I'm not arguing with how you see your duty to a vulnerable planet," she said quietly. "I don't even think you're wrong. Just, you won't complain even when you ought, but as you'll occasionally answer these sorts of questions now," – something else she would never have said to his other self – "I'm asking if you're happy like this." She swallowed. "And it sounds mad, but I need to say it. You don't owe _me_ anything."

And that was where, apparently, eloquence left her. "You know. In case you'd thought."

He had learned just enough by then, in his months in this body, to think after a moment that he understood. She had the idea that he might see himself as given to her in trade, to do his duty by her just as by Earth.

He was baffled, touched, and then slightly saddened. Partly because apparently, in trying desperately not to pressure her, he had become as opaque as his other self had ever been.

And partly because it wasn't Rose's nature – ever, and much less now - to wait this long to settle such a fundamental question if she had it. But his other self had been unable to engage on such topics, caught between ground-rule realities and reluctance to lie to her, and his obvious discomfort had taught her that bringing them up didn't help. And though he would never have so disrespected her as to offer love as a duty, his own or anyone else's, she'd had no way to be sure of that.

It didn't matter now. For once, they were facing a nonexistent problem.

He looked back at her, half-covered in filospores and with the fading scar from their Slitheen-analogue encounter tracing down her clavicle. The one on his flank still caught a bit sometimes. He thought it came to him.

"First," he said, "I'd never play you such a trick, before or after. Jackie would have my neck."

Her lips quirked.

He still had a filospore in his hand. He held it out to her in his palm. "Second," he said, "this is ours." He dropped it and raised a finger to the origin of the scar line on her shoulder. "Also ours." He gestured vaguely around them, to London, or the world. "We follow the broad outline as best we can, both of us. But as I see it, there's enough room in the details for freedom. And they're ours."

He sat very still, watching her closely, as she was watching him. "And I would like, quite freely and rather desperately, to share as many details with you as I can in the time we have." He hesitated, and tilted his head. "If you want."

Rose turned his hands over and interlaced their fingers; hers were shaking. She dropped her eyes and then raised them again. "I've thought, from that first day on the beach, that I'd love you...thrown together, already groomed for each other, and I don't have that temperament, to fight something so good for long just because it wasn't our idea." She smiled ruefully. "But that was a broad outline, no details, and I thought, at least I'll be damned if we're going to just pick up a script already written for us. We'll do it our own way, in our own time. See if you want this life you volunteered for, see if we…if I could get past the muddle we were left in, and do this properly."

Mixed with a dawning hope, he understood; the taste of her in his mind had altered since that day on the beach, the secondhand memories of a hundred worlds now intertwined with his own of this life in place. And he was, he realized, deeply glad for that.

"Not a simple job," he'd said gently, blood rushing in his ears, rubbing his thumbs over the backs of her hands, "when I'm both the same and different." He tapped his own head. "I have some idea myself, remember? I don't expect you ever to pretend it's simple."

She'd pulled her hands free and enfolded his face between them, daring now, a kind of gladness rising in her soldier's eyes. "What I'm trying to say is, I'm glad this is our _how_. I would have hoped for this one, if I could have imagined it." And then, with a small wry bit of courage: "No more counting sames and differents, yeah? It's no way to live with the people you love."

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He waited a long time by the probe for his other self to answer. Eight minutes and seven seconds. And then everything happened at once.

Staticky, more noise than signal, but unmistakable, the graviton beam carried back: _How are you doing this?_

As he finished the mental translation, all hell broke loose.

First, the hum and chatter of every other device stopped in a shared instant, their lights gone dark. The overhead lights dropped to the dim red of emergency power.

It was in that profoundly unnatural silence that Dalekanium plating then crashed down over the windows, knocking off a couple of under-watered potted plants, spilling out their soil on the floor. The door issued a series of final-sounding thumps, as internal bolts snicked into the jam.

He sat quite still for a moment in the following silence, then stood slowly, mind racing. He tried the mobile; no signal. He buzzed the guard desk; no answer, though no telling if it rang on their end. Electronic messaging was down as well.

He pounded on the impervious doors a few times. Then he cupped his hands to the smooth surface and yelled into them, acutely aware he was only entertaining himself. He had, after all, specified the plating thickness himself.

He almost, almost trusted Pete that the room was not about to fill with poison gas.

 _Damn you thoroughly, Pete Tyler. Turning my lab into a containment room set on a tripwire. What antiscientific figment of a demon possessed you?_

Prowling round the walls, his mind clocking over the events immediately preceding, he could virtually hear Pete's response. _You're asking why I'd want automatic isolation protocols for a communications room that stumbled on intelligent signals from another universe? Let's see. What could I possibly be afraid of? Doctor, were you even_ at _Canary Wharf?_

 _Well, be that as it may, damn you twice for not bothering to mention it._

 _And you'd have cheerfully gone along, would you? Helped us measure out the windows?_

 _Of course not. It's barbaric. Trapping a man inside like a canary in a coal mine – one of your own people, no less – till you see what happens to him. Even if it's me._

 _Then perhaps you might have thought of that before pinging another dimension with a cartography tool._

Furiously dissatisfied with this imagined conversation, he glanced at the time. Four AM. At least three hours till Rose arrived. But that was absurd – he must have set off sets of alarms he didn't even know existed. Middle managers must be getting woken by the dozen.

 _But what will happen when they do? How long will you watch the canary before you make a decision? An hour, or till the signal dies, or how long after that?_

He was almost sure Pete lacked the flavor of fanaticism it would take to watch him die of thirst on the chance an unevidenced possession could continue after the probe signal stopped. On the other hand, on a check of the corners he found no hidden cameras or speakers. Most likely they'd decided any surveillance equipment that could let a signal out would defeat the purpose. So Pete wouldn't even have to watch.

Still, the more immediate worry was the trail of devastation Rose would leave through Torchwood, trying to get in.

He glanced back at the probe, running along on its own encased power source without a care in the world. That power source could open the room easily, at the cost of pasting him across the walls. Or he could have directed it safely, made himself a lovely doorway, at only the cost of tearing up and burning out the probe.

 _Are you still there?_ his other self chose that moment to send. _Hate to think I was interrupting anything._

The Doctor sighed. Rose was going to be furious.

He sat back down at the display. In the head-thrumming silence that had fallen in the lab, he was in a situation he'd rarely faced in this world: completely at a loss. The last five minutes had done little for his confidence in facing his creator.

Finally he sent, _I'm here. Are you in danger?_

There was a pause, longer than he calculated the mechanics of the medium required.

 _Not this second. The old girl's still faster than anything with engines. But talking to you - how is this possible?_

That, on the other hand, made him crack a smile despite everything. _Directed graviton perturbatio_ n, he started to pulse, and then stopped.

It wasn't just a technical question. His other self was asking how the Metacrisis had achieved this when the Time Lord had burned out a star and broken his hearts trying to do the same for a fraction of the time. He was asking what, years ago, he had missed.

 _Asymmetric dimensional liminal penetrability by directed graviton perturbation,_ he sent instead. _This world is at a local maximum. It's why they were able to invent jumpers here in the first place. I wasn't sure you'd be able to get a signal back uphill to me at all._

 _Wasn't sure myself,_ came the reply. _Had to refit the gravitational receiver as an amplifier. Doubt I'll be able to lock on again if I lose you, and I'm not sure how long it will last regardless._

After a moment, well aware he was stalling for time, the metacrisis Doctor sent back: _Wondered why you took your time to respond._

His other self's reply was baffling. _Why did you knock four times?_

 _Knock?_ He send back after a moment. _The quadruple ping? Linear positional tracking. How many times would_ you _ping a mass of unknown location on a linear trajectory?_

Long delay. _Sorry. Laughing at myself. Bit twitchy here._

He lost patience. _What is going on over there? You're hopping round in, what, Mars orbit? With a fleet after you. Are they hostiles? From here, I can tell you when and where they mass, but that's all. Why haven't you jumped?_

In the silence that followed he recognized their own simple, unanswerable technique for avoiding unwanted questions. What his other self finally sent was: _Tell me about your world._

Irritated, and irritated at himself for his anger in the midst of the unlooked-for miracle of speaking at all, he sent the retort he'd contained before. _Just wrapping up world domination. Mowing down the last resistance. Do you really have time for this?_

 _All right_ , his other self replied _. I deserved that. But tell me anyway._

Suddenly curious, he sent out: _After all the thoughts we've had of how much good we could do, why are you sure I'm joking?_

In answer, and not, his other self replied, _How is Rose?_

He sobered, and sat there for a long moment. The pity, love, pride, and heartache were all old friends, roiling round together without disarming each other. But he had never expected to be faced again with another man carrying the same mix in a far more painful ratio. At last, he sent it quickly, because that was what he would have wanted.

 _She's brilliant._ _She sold Parliament on alien refugee immigration. Our anniversary is next month._

A few moments later he got back: _Oh, my other self. I'm so glad. So glad. Thank you._

Mingled with the sorrow, and the odd feeling of gratification at that benediction, the vague dread that had settled since their first contact deepened. There was only one circumstance under which their selves would ever be that maudlin.

 _Are you all right?_ he sent back. _Are you dying? Regenerating?_

 _I'm always all right. At present, in the best of health. Please. Tell me everything._

He wanted to tell his other self what an ass they were, asking all manner of personal questions and then putting others off their own trail with transparent diversions. Asymmetric personal divulgence. As if it weren't only courtesy that made people pretend to be distracted.

A pure Gallifreyan would have done it. Instead he settled for sending back, _Can you wait a few minutes? Have to deal with something here._

 _I'll be here._

There was no telling how long his other self's kludged-together graviton transmitter would hold, and it was clear enough he wasn't going to tell him even if he was dying. There was nothing for it but to try to find a way to patch in Rose. The Time Lord might not tell her anything either, but at least she could decide whether to speak to him.

A quick inventory of supplies at hand turned up nothing that would even take the shine off Dalekanium without killing him. The obvious weak spot was the electronic connectivity to the outside. If the wiring was intact, he could at least get out a signal.

Tracing the cabling to where it snaked under the walls put a quick end to that hope. It came up in his hand, cleanly sliced.

He hoped restoring the room to its pre-mousetrap condition was going to cost Pete a fortune.

He toyed seriously for a few moments with whether anything in the lab could boost his mongrel telepathic capabilities. The trouble there wasn't Dalekanium, but distance. But there was quite literally nothing on Earth that could do it, and nothing in this galaxy that could do it without frying him and Rose both.

He ran his hands through his hair, searched the nooks and crannies of the lab, and then sat down again. He opened the casing on the universal mobile he'd stolen from the TARDIS before his eviction, and started fiddling about with one hand to see if it could work one last time in this universe to call home.

It was attuned only to their old shared universe, in a hundred different ways. He could have fixed it with the screwdriver, if the screwdriver were working. He fiddled for a few minutes, till he realized the mobile was never going to deign to speak to a number in this universe, and lost his stomach for watching his other self jump round alone in the dark.

 _Back now._

 _Is everything all right there?_

Trapped like a rat, but the Torchwood folks are otherwise lovely, he didn't send. Instead: _You want to know about this world?_

 _Very much._

So he fiddled with the phone with one hand, and used the other to tell his other self what he would have wanted to know in his place. He talked about the subtle effects of slight differences in physical constants here, the strange little shifts in modern history which Rose had traced back to a splitting point about fifty years ago between the universes, and the way Tony's uncanny knack for stumbling into it had forced him to move the growing daughter-TARDIS four times. Most recently, to the attic.

Then he told him about tracking down and coming to know the analogues of the people they cared for here. First Sarah Jane and Harriet. Then Martha, whom he'd first thought he might serve best by staying away, until learning that here she wasn't drawn to men. Jack, for whom he still kept out a hopeful eye, on the chance that another thirty centuries of diverging history would somehow still produce him and send him back.

Not under any idea that they were somehow substitutes - that was too Gallifreyan for him now. But at first, as a sort of next of kin; somehow one felt that anything one could do for them would be in their namesakes' honor. Later, because they were brilliant.

He gave scrupulous and slightly defiant equal time to the things he doubted would meet approval, that marked him a most improper offshoot of a Time Lord. Most of them were Torchwood-related.

The Time Lord listened with apparent fascination, delighted by the analogues of old friends, full of questions. He never said a work of rebuke or caution, which was first gratifying, and then worrisome. The Metacrisis toyed briefly with the idea of ramping up his described transgressions till he got a response.

 _And what about yourself?_ he sent instead. _Tell us about your new companion, then?_ If you won't talk about the warships on your tail.

He realized a moment later that this betrayed his certainty about Donna, whom he'd deliberately avoided mentioning, after all. But that was one bit of knowledge the Time Lord couldn't begrudge him, so he forged ahead. _And Donna. Did she pull through….the loss intact?_

 _Intact, and back home now. Her mother was furious. Quite right, too._

He felt cold. _I'm sorry you had to do it alone._ And then, with a terrible dawning hunch: _Are you alone now?_

For a long moment he was certain his other self would meet him with silence again. He was just mastering frustration with pity, when to his surprise he got back: _After Donna, it seemed reckless._

Dragons and mayflies, he thought.

 _I've got a bit off course_ , his other self went on a moment later. _Not a very proper Time Lord either, just now._

 _You are,_ he sent back swiftly, _the most rubbish Time Lord in all space and time. And all the better for it._

After a long moment, his other self began to send back, in a steady pattern that reminded him of a toneless rush to get out something unthinkable.

 _I meddled with a fixed point._

He sat back against his chair, blood rushing in his ears. A fixed event in time and space, one of the pushpins that hung up history upon spacetime.

At least his other self's lack of shock at his own behavior was now more understandable.

He himself was both stunned and somehow unsurprised. He had lived years now without having to deal with fixed points, but they were impossible to forget - the rage and helplessness one felt again a historical abomination that could be freely visited but never changed. It was one of the ironies of a Time Lord's role; the people caught up in the waves of history, like he himself in this second world, could act with all the freedom their circumstances allowed, while the one watching from the shore could do nothing.

He rubbed his eyes. It was becoming clear. Whatever his other self had done – whatever flavor of dramatic and forbidden rescue – he had done it on Mars itself, opening the rift there.

 _And that fleet…_ he sent, knowing the answer already.

 _Not a fleet. Reapers._

And what sort of reapers, he wondered, might the spaciotemporal sins of a Time Lord call down? Something like a war fleet, indeed.

Yet the situation was also baffling. _But aren't you in the TARDIS?,_ he sent. Ship and Time Lord together ought to be able to open a dissonant frequency, make the reapers' internal tension unsustainable, and get past them to mend the rift in the universe with barely a seam visible.

 _They know our true name._

He sat very still for a moment. Then he stood and pushed the chair back, putting the probe out of his reach till he could trust himself to speak through it again. Absently, he set the probe computers to back-calculating the rift's location – they couldn't measure it directly, but they could derive it from their records of the past few hours, the negative space the reapers never entered but never strayed far from.

He had his answer. What must the reapers a Time Lord generates be like, indeed. Of course they would know his true name. They were the universe itself, and it knew everything.

It was clearer now. His other self couldn't jump – he had to keep the reapers focused on himself. And he couldn't open a frequency to track and close them down. He couldn't even look out a porthole.

Any chance he gave the reapers to send data back to him was a chance for them to bind him with his name. And a Time Lord under control by the universe's repo men was very possibly the end of the world. Most certainly the end of the next blue-green planet over.

So his other self was out in the dark, unable to do anything but jump away blindly when they touched his ship, every type of eye he had squeezed tightly shut, lest they open on the death of all. Until he heard the monotone pinging of the probe, a slow encoded signal he had to consciously focus on to translate manually, and so could not be ambushed by. He would have turned off the TARDIS translation functions long ago.

 _How long_ , he sent finally, _have you been out there?_

 _Long enough to notice all the things the ship is missing._

He laughed out loud at that, raggedly, his own voice sounding strange after an hour of speaking through the display screen's light. The screwdriver and the mobile had been the biggest of his depredations from the TARDIS, but he'd had hours - while the others piloted, tow-boating Earth back to its orbit, and he tried to distract himself from the certainty of never seeing them again. He'd taken nothing his other self couldn't replace, just enough little wonders to face a new world with, and hopefully cause a bit of inconvenience. It had been petty, but he couldn't thoroughly regret it.

Not least because the mobile was finally cooperating, and he had the beginnings of an idea.

 _Those things_ , he sent back, _included a microcircuit modifier, with which I've been busy on your mobile. And my probe sits in the middle of a room full of cartography equipment._

Long silence. Finally: _You want to relay the reaper fleet's coordinates from your probe receiver to the TARDIS? Using the mobile as the translator?_

 _And then you set her to send out the dissonance frequency blind. Yes. Cut yourself out of the loop entirely. And there's no danger on this end. They aren't paying any attention to the graviton beam; it's not from you._

Waiting for his maker's verdict on his plan, he felt oddly like a small child presenting him a drawing for approval.

 _I'm sorry we didn't have longer before,_ said his other self. _I didn't trust myself there, you see._

He let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding, thinking of those moments on Bad Wolf Bay. _These things happen,_ he sent back airily. _Are we doing this or not?_

 _Just finished prepping the TARDIS. She's had a time lately. I'm ready._

It worked splendidly.

The reapers drifted together and massed up. His mind was filled with peculiar hunting metaphors, as he forced himself to wait patiently for the kill shot; he chose not to mention this to his other self, who would not have approved. _Now_ , he thought, and sent the coordinates, the signal winding its way through the mad relay line from mobile to probe to TARDIS.

He had his answer in the silent flare the probe sent back, the display blooming diffusely for a moment and then dimming, to show only Mars in the empty sky.

He whooped, and yelled out to the unhearing rest of Torchwood, "Brilliant!"

And then a moment later the display filled with them again, like the ocean smoothing the dimple made by a tossed rock. A moment later, the unseen point source of the TARDIS shot out another gravity lance to the planet, and resumed its weary dance.

No time to open sensors to find the rift, much less seal it. They'd come back too fast. He sat with a thump. _What happened?_

 _They're still generating._

He pulled at his hair. _I can see that. For the love of God, are_ you _still meddling with that point?_

' _For the love of God?' Where did you pick up an expression like that?_

He narrowed his eyes. That diversion tactic did not come from a man with no idea what might have just happened. _I don't know. No. Our Donna says it._

 _You found her too?_

He had not only found her, which was marvelous; he had tracked down for her the analogue of the fellow the other world's Donna had loved in the Library. That had been less of a rousing success.

But he had, for once, no interest in memory. He had lost patience completely. _Stop changing the subject! Trust me for a single solitary minute. You've raised loneliness and secrecy to art forms. But I am the shadow of your own mind, I'm a genocide in no position to judge you, and I'm in a different universe. Your secrets are safe with me, and if you will stop holding out on me, it is just barely, barely possible I might be able to help._

There was a pause. _I don't distrust you. I never have. I wanted to remember your world and your futures as something beautiful I had done, untouched by what I've since done here. But now I see that by the time I left, I'd hurt you more already than anything I could tell you now might. I'm very sorry._

The Metacrisis swallowed. _Everything I have, you earned, and gave me freely. I wish you could see it, this life in place._ He sat up straighter, and sent briskly: _Now, what in the hell are you still doing to your universe? I'll be the one to say it first: you may have to go back and undo whatever mad rescue started this._

He toyed with the mobile with new purpose as he waited. The link along that daisy-chain of devices had been easier than he expected. It was as much like being in the TARDIS control room as this mousehole conversation was like being face to face, which had given him an idea.

 _A steadier hand than mine took care of that already,_ his other self sent back. _Then I thought perhaps it was one of…I called them little people; I'd gone a bit mad. But it wasn't. So I thought, something on Mars itself that I missed perhaps, and so I came back here to this time, before it all began._

 _But look where the reapers focus. They're after me. I'm what's changed. My upcoming choices were a fixed point, and it's shifted, and I don't know why. I would change it if I could. But I'm afraid it's because I know my future. Just a bit of it. Just I've been told my death is coming, and I fear there's part of me that won't agree to die._

He watched appalled as the probe took whole minutes to convey that misery in its monotone binary way. It was impossible to truly run off at the mouth through this medium – he was watching his other self, focused and deliberate, fillet himself open. The time the Ood had spoken of was nearly here, and it was devastating.

So, in their way, he grasped at the problem he could grapple with: it didn't compute. It was true that his other self was an unusual bead on their chain in many ways, born half in love and profoundly attached to all his companions, even after they left him. It was his reluctance to regenerate from his last mortal wound that the Metacrisis had to thank for his own absurd, unprecedented existence.

And he knew in his memories the dreadful side of regeneration - that siren call of the body to its own smelting down, the slow pilfering of one's soul, the last fading sight of a stranger refurnishing it as his own. True, in reality, it was a homecoming of the drop to the ocean, and that stranger was more than a brother emerging from a shared deeper self. But for those few minutes, it didn't feel that way.

And for him, thinking of his other self dissolving in a species of death that couldn't even be mourned, it didn't feel that way either.

But the idea of the Time Lord putting any of that above a real need – much less above healing a rift in time which could swallow the Earth – was absurd. It was belied by every memory and instinct in his own body.

Absurd, if he knew the choice that faced him up ahead. If he could just escape this trap and go face it piece by piece, day by day. But what if he couldn't, if he had to resign himself blindly now to the array of every possibility that ended in his death? Was that even possible?

He wasn't sure. But he was sure of something else. His memories included the ship command codes, and he had just finished inserting them in the mobile's memory. If the channel stayed open, he could pilot the TARDIS.

 _All right,_ he replied after a moment. _Here's what we do. I've back-calculated the rift coordinates. And I can see the fleet. I'm going to pilot you. I'll use mostly dead reckoning, and only cycle the probe receiver once per second to get updates from the TARDIS sensors. Nothing long enough to get our true name through before I can cut it off. We're going to get past them to the rift, seal it up, and then deal with them. And you are going to sit down, have the TARDIS restrain you, turn on the sensors for me, and ride it out like Odysseus past the sirens._

The fleet formed up, lost its target, and diffused again.

Finally: _So now you want to steal my ship?_

He laughed. _Made in your image. What did you expect?_

And then, more seriously: _Born in battle, remember? I'll never match you as a strategist, but I am a_ much _better pilot. I know that this is dangerous. But this dodging about in the dark will kill you differently. There was something Rose said once. When you can't choose if, choose how._

He waited as his other self considered it. He felt he knew, as if they still shared the same body, what was going through his mind; there was only one conclusion he could come to. If the Time Lord failed to escape and rendezvous with his fixed point, his world's history would unravel ahead of him. He might never see it, jumping about in the dark down the long years of silence till the TARDIS ran out of power. But when he died in his living coffin, his universe would die too.

But if they tried this plan, and the Metacrisis were also bound by the reapers through the probe, there was no precedent for that, no telling what he might drag a second universe into. Easy enough to prevent, if he were prepared to drop the signal at the first sign they were trying it, and leave the first universe to its fate. If he could go through with it.

What his other self didn't know was that one update per second at this resolution was unlikely to cut it. And that Pete Tyler, bless his suspicious heart, had already provided a different containment plan.

His other self might be the better strategist, but he was the better tactician. And so he put the time to good use. He set the probe power supply to destroy itself safely on a one-hour timer, faster than he himself would need under reaper possession to use it to escape. If he did have to shorten the data interval, risk the reapers and activate the timer, the probe was a certain loss no matter what happened; he couldn't risk providing himself an abort code. Pete could explain the smoking wreckage to Parliament himself.

For what felt like the first time in years, he was properly grateful for the mind his other self had gifted him. If things ended badly, there was no telling if the reapers would use their hour of control to make him off himself. But as some first part of him came unmoored, waking to the nameless possibility that he'd seen everything he loved for the last time and it ended here, instinct and memory were his guardrails, and he finished the job.

Then he scribbled out a note to Rose.

There was no real choice; neither one of them had a chance in the moral scales in competition with a universe. Only, he would have liked to have a chance to explain it. To tell her he was really very sorry, that he never meant to be the second Doctor to leave her, and that he had wanted very desperately to share all the details left with her.

He shook his head. He was the one being maudlin now; no doubt he'd wind up explaining himself to her directly in an hour, with a very embarrassing note to destroy. He blinked his eyes clear and signed it.


	3. Chapter 3

Late one night, this third year of sharing a world, they had come home triumphant from the week's work and tipsy from ringing in Donna's birthday. They bumbled down the hallway, batted round an astrophysics riddle and agreed on an absurd solution, and then made it to the bed to model their more heroic moments ineptly for each other. ("Doctor, I can't be the Kray unless you _hold still._ You're Rose now, and time's barely moving for you compared to me. Do it properly, and I'll show you how we caught him.") Manifestly not at their most impressive, they turned out to be more in shape for a snogging, which was more playful than intense, until it wasn't.

In the back of his mind he'd laughed at himself, remembering how he'd once looked forward to their sharing a bed with only the simple anticipation of a new game with a beloved friend. ("You honestly want me to still call you Doctor in bed? Still, could be worse. You said that other bloke called himself the Master?") How thoroughly he'd missed the point, but in another way, not really.

They'd been under the blanket, Rose just starting the lazy drift down from her peak and going on in sweetly filthy detail, as she did when things were going well for her. He'd been listening greedily to her inspired creativity this time round, burying his hand in her hair, his wedding band glinting in it as they moved, adrift in the touch and sound of her.

The room around him was amber, gold, neither; a palace familiar like a favorite book, and new in every intricate corner like a small universe. Walls reflected her left-behind dreams of gymnastic glory and the frozen waves of a long-ago planet, and the odd flicker of the time vortex that had once blazed in every nook.

It took him several seconds to realize what he was adrift in was her mind.

He went utterly still. He extricated himself carefully and dropped back alone into his own body. He rolled down onto his side and caught her shoulders, heart pounding. What a way to derail the moment.

"Rose. I'm so sorry. Did I scare you?"

She shook her head and laid one hand over his heart. She was panting a bit. "No, it's all right. I let you in. What happened?"

He sighed; his pulse began to settle. What indeed. "Something I've got no memories of doing in this situation. It's usually more a car mechanic sort of role, figuring out where the clunking's from." He shook his head and raised himself up on one elbow. "I'm never drinking before getting lucky again. Possibly never, just to keep the option open. Sure you're all right?"

Rose mirrored him, up on the opposite elbow, and lifted her free hand to his face. Her fingertips traced down his cheek, his jaw. Her eyes met his, inviting. "Want to try it again?"

He blinked, but that alchemy of trust and desire in her face was intoxicating; his body woke a moment later and betrayed his reaction. He lifted his hand back to her temple. "It's not something I need, love. Obviously, from the evidence to date. I…"

She ran her hand down his arm and spread his fingers, and flashed him a grin. "I wouldn't mind another go myself. If you want."

He laughed back; his heart pounded in a different way. He did a quick-and-dirty calculation of their blood alcohol levels based on body weight and time since consumption. Both still a bit sloshed, but not decision-ruiningly so.

"No memories for now," he had answered after a moment, his voice low in his own ears. "There are things in my head we don't want in yours." First among them, the true name from his other self, dangerous baggage in any universe. "Whatever you want me to see, think of a door, and open it."

He led her into his own mind first, thankful for the remaining liquid courage. He laid open there the animal warmth of the past hours, and the satisfactions of their work for this Earth, lit by the sweet glow of this life they'd grown. The unforgotten stars, which could wait a while longer. The fear of failing the charge laid on him to defend this world, or committing more violence trying to uphold it, for lack of his other self's insane certainty of always finding another way. The way the thought of her at odd moments filled him with out-of-context happiness.

"All right so far?" he whispered, half-aloud, feeling most profoundly naked. "Are you still sure?"

Her answer was a wash of delight, fascination and understanding. Then a few moments later, a mixed surge of shyness and abandon, as she opened her mind to him in turn.

She showed him there her slow-grown love for this adopted Earth; he expected, beneath it, the familiar shared half-buried longing for the TARDIS, for that blaze of possibility just before the door opened each time. And there it was.

But the stronger image was predawn tea and donuts, on terrible chairs in a borrowed lab, with a Doctor marked with fading claw scars and a wedding band.

He'd denied to himself having the question. He'd tried so hard not to expect her to pretend it was simple, to hold to the Gallifreyan wisdom that made no distinction between his selves. But it was written there; she loved him, half-human and unplanned, the Mayfly Doctor, with no ship just yet but a fine array of contraband toys. She loved him with a heart-stopping intensity that had frightened her as it grew, and did still.

And the shameless spike of triumph he felt at that made clear he was part human in this way too, and had been fooling himself all along.

Somewhere in that moment he noticed, dimly, the fading outlines of her other old fears he hadn't even guessed at – something about being too human, too limited. Amazing, he'd thought, his heart still reeling, what minds would fixate on to keep from hoping too much.

Rose had laughed in agreement, hands framing his face as the understanding still shuddered through him. Though he'd suspected, later, she might have known that all along.

x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x

The probe pulled him back to the present. His other self had finally decided.

 _Do you accept,_ the Time Lord sent _, that you have to drop the connection if they call for you? I'm not sure whether memory really tells you how hard it is. No one will call you Destroyer of Worlds, but you'll never forget. But you must do it._

 _I love this world too,_ he replied _._ Rose and Donna and Tony and Jackie and so many others. Even a nameless Torchwood director. _I won't endanger it._

 _When we're done, you'll have to direct the TARDIS to release me. It will obey only you until you certify me sane._

He grinned. _I may be forced at some point, under strict necessity, to do a barrel roll._

 _I need to tell you something first, though. In case this doesn't end well._

He braced himself. _Now's the time._

 _Remember our last shared memory before you split,_ his other self sent _. Just before I cast off the spark that became you. Remember what we were running toward. I didn't lie to you, on the beach, but it didn't seem the place for the whole truth. You weren't born only in battle. So much more so, you were born in love._

The Metacrisis Doctor sat back and took a heavy breath. He blinked furiously a few times, then gave up and wiped his eyes. _You're ruining my navigation. Are you locked in?_

 _Locked in. From here on, believe nothing I say till the sensors are off again. Allons-y._

He started the one-second cycle on reception from the TARDIS sensors, took a last reading on the fleet location, and flung the TARDIS toward the breach.

It was like running through a night forest with a stuttering flashlight. The TARDIS sensor data was far better than the probe's; he saw _them_ , somehow still winged but not remotely organic, with engine intakes for heads, full of the cold fire of spacetime's merciless bookkeeping. He dodged where he could, and fired out the dissonance frequency to clear his path where he couldn't.

He was leaping around the probe console as if it were a different one, in a ship with a huon heart; he could almost believe the TARDIS saw his face across the worlds and knew him as her own.

His other self was ranting, cluttering up the frequency, fully in the reapers' grip; he got snatches of it with the data dump every second. Something about, unsurprisingly, cleansing. He tried not to think of what it must feel like, and pushed on.

Then, as he'd suspected, their density ramped up as he approached the rift. They might be without consciousness, but the reapers had their one own way of sterilizing, and were no friends to the ad hoc Time Lord stitch-it-up-as-you-go approach; they were coalescing in his path. The ship took a shuddering blow to the flank, revectored and pressed on. He hoped his other self's restraints were done with an eye to crash safety.

Then another.

He shook his head, took a deep breath, and looked round the room. Not where he'd hoped to die. Entombed in Dalekanium – the millions of Daleks on his conscience might have been amused, if they were capable.

He activated the autodestruct timer, then dropped the data interval to a half-second. Then a quarter.

The visibility became splendid; he could get round the reapers again. Minutes to the rift.

And then of course the reapers noticed, and the probe's pulse began to whisper with the silvery syllables of their ancient name.

His other self was frantic, half-breaking through, incoherent. _Drop it, you lunatic! I am the Destroyer of Worlds. We must polish spacetime smooth of sparks and stars. You can't imagine what you'll do. I can't watch. If I could reach the controls, I'd wipe it all clean. Rose, forgive me. Cut the link!_

 _I'm locked in a containment room,_ he paused long enough to send back, to whatever part of his other self could still hear him _. Pete became paranoid about signals from other universes after Canary Wharf. Seems he was right after all. Be at peace._

The reapers were nearly touching each other. He made the data feed nearly continuous, with an interruption at one-second intervals. Almost there.

And that was when they got through.

The true name embraced him. It seeped along his axons from one neuron to the next, ringing with clarity and peace. Only one thing to do, no more choices, no more loss; cleanse and be cleansed. He shuddered; his hand extensors spasmed.

He dropped to his knees, gripped one hand with the other, and kept steering. But he was sinking, he was only a Metacrisis, and if the Time Lord couldn't fight it, a lone hand in a jar had no chance. The waters closed over him.

He let the mobile drop. It was time to cleanse the world.

And then the Donna bits, which were not having it, caught fire.

Down the daisy chain of his mind, from one synapse to another, they put it to the rest of him with brutal Chiswick clarity that that was not their true name at all, and therefore not his, and it was time to get hands back on the wheel, Spaceman.

He broke the water line, gasped, and pushed the lid off the jar. The tendrils of the name binding pulled at him like cobwebs, like gravity. He stayed on his knees and kept steering.

The TARDIS broke through. He groped his way into the chair, set up the line of sight, and deployed the fire at the heart of the TARDIS to cauterize the tear. The reapers went mad around it.

His other self was still ranting, but the flavor of it had changed. _Unanticipated nominal anomaly. Incomplete nominal lock. Unregulated spaciotemporal rift reversal. Polish? You did it. You did it._

His mind was still crackling with the slow burn of the rebellious synapses. His true name was apparently a mongrelized unknown, part Time Lord, part human. A new creation. Donna would have been pleased.

The rift was closing. He turned his attention back to the reapers, still a danger to the ship if not the universe. But they were already winking out, clearing the sky like stars at dawn.

He waited till the TARDIS sensors went silent. Then he directed her to release and recognize the Time Lord. _All right there?_

 _All right. You were brilliant. You are a maniac and should not be allowed to drive a golf cart._

 _You may not have long in absolute time before it reopens_ , he replied, panting. _You'd better move on quickly,_ he started to continue, and then stopped as he remembered. He ceased feeling remotely victorious.

He had only given his other self the chance to face a different death. Maybe a better one, but that was mostly the sort of thing the living said to console each other.

 _I'm so very sorry_ , he sent instead. He looked down at his hands, back under his own control. _I wish I could be there._

 _I am_ , his other self replied, _so glad you're not. I think that will let me go on. I don't think the rift will reopen._

Baffled, he sent back: _Why? You're not afraid to die any more? Was the name binding that bad?_

 _Don't think it's dying I was afraid to do,_ he answered.

 _Afraid to do what, then?_

 _To stop loving them. All of you. Always her. And Martha, Jackie, Mickey, Sarah Jane, Jack, Donna, you. The new man moves on and never looks back. He'll love others, and they'll be just as brilliant. But they won't be mine. Losing them is bearable - it happens, when you live long enough. But to stop missing them…_

He nodded, as if his other self could see. It struck him, absurdly, that love acted a bit like gravity - drawing together a few particular bits of stardust into new creations, rising solid and specific from the uniform scatter of the cosmos. There were all the empty halls of the multiverse between them, and he would have done anything to be able to put a hand on his shoulder.

 _I know. The other reason I sought their analogues out here. To never forget. But whatever you face, and when you're a new man without these old griefs, while I live, I won't stop loving them._

 _I know. That's why I can bear it. Outlive me, and remember them for both of us. I still don't want to go. But I think that now I can._

 _You should go and see them,_ he sent desperately. _See them all before you die. For that matter, take a vacation first. Go somewhere tropical. You have time. For the love of God, you have a time machine._

He waited a long time for a reply, watching the display. Stillness had fallen again in the heavens of Mars; there was only the planet itself, spinning on in its appointed path. Finally he realized no reply was coming. He wondered if the TARDIS receiver had finally burned out, or if his other self had just left.

He could be abrupt that way. But sometimes, apparently, it was because he didn't trust himself.

The Metacrisis rubbed his eyes. Gritty stubble was coming in along his jaw, and he needed a shower. He needed Rose. He reached over and turned off the probe.

Exactly four seconds later, the door snicked, thumped, and then slid roughly open. A forest of black rifle barrels bristled through first, the men massed behind obscured by thick black body armor.

He took a breath. He could still see their eyes.

"Hallo, Freddie," he said brightly. "Hallo, Max. And hallo, Pete. It's a good thing you brought enough guns. Is Rose there?"

Pete slipped to the front, but stayed in the doorway. "She left half an hour ago. We tailed her home."

 _Tailed her?_ He took a closer look at Pete. There was something haggard in his face that made him suspect they'd had words in the past few hours which wouldn't easily be taken back.

He fished out the ordinary mobile. With the door open, the signal was back.

Rose answered on the third ring. He could hear the strain of the past four hours in her voice, the unbelieving broken hope. "Doctor?"

"I'm so sorry. I'm fine. I'll tell you everything. Are you home?"

She let out one ragged breath, and then laughed. There was an unhinged edge to it, and it took her a moment to get speech back in order.

"Yes. Can you walk? I'm not welcome there just now. I've been up in the attic."

With the daughter-TARDIS. His breath hitched. Only one reason for that. "Are you all right?"

"Everything's fine. Pete will let you go. He promised that much, if the signal broke." The unconscious chill in her voice confirmed his suspicions.

Hands up, he brushed past Pete and through the guards without a word. They pulled back to let him through. Not that flavor of fanaticism, after all.

Halfway down the hall, he stopped and turned round. "The probe will explode in fourteen minutes and twelve seconds. You may want to move anything you're especially attached to."

Rose met him, half-running, on the street in the cold predawn. Her eyes were pink; she stopped wordlessly, framed his face in her chilly hands, and took him in for a long moment. He drank in the sight and feel, his mind moving in the wrong frames for words. He could think only of the billions of ways they could have missed having this detail.

"You're all right?"

I'm always all right, his other self would have said. "I will be."

They stumbled inside, he kicked the door closed, and they leaned against the foyer wall, surrounded by shoes and umbrellas, forehead to forehead. She was shaking with adrenaline, her fingers restless on his back. He saw the daughter-TARDIS behind her on the table, tools scattered around it, with a crowbar wedged a finger's breadth into its plasmic shell. But intact.

She would have been preparing to threaten or cajole Pete into opening the door, with her on the ready, depending what came out, to look into the Time Vortex at the heart of the TARDIS, and take up the mantle of the Bad Wolf again. The powers of a demigod, and a life expectancy of twenty minutes.

"Were you more expecting," he whispered, "to save me, or contain me?"

She shook her head against him. "Only way I could think of to do both. I'd be in by now, too, if you hadn't shatterfried the shell. Fair warning, we've got Mum and Donna converging, ten minutes out. _What happened_? _"_

He closed his eyes, felt her ribs rise and fall under his hands, and told her.

In the back of his mind, he thought of the future as he spoke; he suspected they were both unemployed now. He had a dim idea of teaching, of their seeking out apprentices. This world would always need defending, and the TARDIS would live a long time.

It was a rubbish idea for a Time Lord, so he liked it.

 _God's in His heaven_ , an Earth saying went; _all's well with the world_. It wasn't, entirely, and he wasn't certain which God. Anyway, his other self – far but unforgotten, whether he remembered them or not - would not entirely have approved.

That was all right. Now he was breaking rules for both of them.


End file.
